


At Times Things Are So Fine, and at Times They're Not

by RosalindBeatrice



Category: Music RPF, The Beatles
Genre: 1960s, 1960s Music, Angst, Beatles Anthology, M/M, Male Slash, McLennon, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 16:03:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6158995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosalindBeatrice/pseuds/RosalindBeatrice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paul pines for John. Ringo sees it, George and John don't. Or do they? And why does Paul insist on doing 24 takes of a song that they don't even end up releasing? Told from John's, Ringo's, and George's perspectives.</p><p>Based around the composition of "That Means A Lot," a Beatles track that remained unreleased until 1996, and set between September 1964 and December 1965.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Times Things Are So Fine, and at Times They're Not

**March 1965**

 

They were listening to the playback of Take 20 and all John could think was that the song was shite.

 

Crap, rubbish, shite with a capital S. 

 

None of the bits fit together. The song wasn’t as hopeless as “A World Without Love,” but neither was it very far behind. It was deficient, a cripple, not beginning anywhere or going anywhere. John’d tossed in the middle eight to try to help, but even that didn’t make it any better. The thing was, he was pretty certain that Paul knew it was shite, but still he persisted in flogging them through take after take with that trademark pluckiness that John detested so much. Always had to be such a bloody good sport about everything.   
  
In February they’d done it heavy on the reverb, with the guitars shivering and Paul singing dreamlike as if through a thick fog. It was alright John supposed, but since the song didn’t seem altogether right, they’d let it sit for a month. He’d hoped that would be the end of the matter, but a few days ago Paul suggested resurrecting it for  _Help!_ , though where in the hell the writers would fit it in—or why—John couldn’t see. 

 

So they attempted an up-tempo country-and-western rendition, switching the key to G, but that didn’t work either and Paul made them go back to the way they’d done it originally, the subsequent three takes sounding more and more lacklustre as their enthusiasm and patience wore off. He couldn’t understand why Paul was being so thickheaded about the fucking thing. They’d both written songs before that weren’t up to snuff, had no difficulty tossing ‘em in the bin. It was what allowed them to keep ascending the charts with an eerie regularity (a phenomenon John always expected to end, though it never did). 

 

He knew that Paul knew it was a wash; at the present moment Paul was swivelling on his stool, leg bouncing, and chewing on a fingernail, not wanting to admit it to himself. 

 

“It’s rubbish,” John said, as the tape spooled to a halt. He didn’t mean to sound so severe, but there you were. He’d been up too late the night before and he was knackered. He wanted a jam buttie and a joint, wanted to curl into his sofa at Kenwood with a notebook and write something better than this load of bollocks. 

 

Paul’s head snapped toward him. 

 

“C’mon, Paul, we all know it,” he said, feeling the others’ eyes on him too, “We’ve been at it over a month now. It ain’t going anywhere. Let’s just move onto the next one, eh?”

 

He could see Paul’s jaw working. “It’s fine,” he said, voice quiet. “We just need to run through it one or two more times.” 

 

“I’m telling you, it’s shite,” he said. He inflated his cheeks and blew out a frustrated current of air. “I know it, they know it”—he swept his arm toward George and Ringo—”George knows it, we all know it. Right, George?”

 

He looked up at the control room, but true to form George Martin remained diplomatically silent. Paul glanced at Ringo, who gave a mild shrug which said plainly, I’m not getting in the middle; you two work it out. George was sliding his hand down the neck of his guitar with eyes downcast, forming silent chords, his version of sticking his fingers in his ears. 

 

John stared at Paul, which he knew Paul hated. He could see color rising in Paul’s cheeks. “Are we packing it in or are we packing it in?” he pressed. 

 

Paul swivelled, avoiding his eyes. “I don’t see why—”  
  
“Well if you’re not gonna call it a day then I am,” he said. 

 

Christ, Paul would be a madonna about it. He’d been twitchy about the damn thing from the beginning. 

 

They’d been rooming together the night of one of the rehearsals for the Christmas special. Paul had gone off with some bird afterwards and John had retired early. He’d had a bath, watched some telly, the usual routine. He wasn’t tired though, nerves were still zinging with adrenaline from the rehearsal, so to stave off boredom he’d lit a joint and wandered around the room, lifting aside the curtain to stare at the London lights and thinking about the diamond watch he’d bought for Cyn at Harrods earlier that day and what a fucking sham the whole thing had gotten to be. 

 

Well, it’d always been a sham, but the Beatles high, the fact that he could still stand to shag her in the early days, was enough to stop him thinking about it with any real sort of depth. As 1964 was giving way to 1965 and their two-week holiday in the Alps neared, however, he’d begun to wonder how much fucking more of it he could really endure. Now that he’d made love to his fill of gorgeous and sophisticated women, Cyn felt like a dowdy cousin. One who worshiped the ground he walked upon no matter how nasty he got with her, which made it worse. He wondered if that’s how it was with every woman after you’d known them a year or two: the blind love, the sickening hero worship. He couldn’t imagine a bloke acting the same way. He wished, and not for the first time, that there was some girl out there with Paul’s brains and Bardot’s body. 

 

These had been the silly things running through his head when he spied the scrap of paper beneath a pile of Paul’s neckties on the desk. Paul’s black, even writing caught his attention. And though the paper looked as though it had been hidden, well—John never hid anything from Paul, did he? It seemed only fair he should read what Paul had more or less left lying in plain view. Secretly, he’d hoped that the paper was a sordid letter to Jane detailing all the sorts of things Paul was going to do to her once Christmas came ‘round. It would allow him to tease Paul for days, and furthermore a twisted part of him found it a bit of a turn-on, his best mate doing filthy things to his girl. But it’d only been the words to that stupid bloody song.

 

He hadn’t thought much of it at the time. The lyrics were a retread of “She Loves You.”  _When he says he loves you, that means a lot_ , and that sort of rubbish. Uninterested, he’d left the note uncovered and sprawled on the bed to work on his own writing and would have forgotten ever finding it except that Paul, seeing when he got back to the room that it had been discovered, wanted to fucking row about it. 

 

Which flabbergasted John. Paul had never been bashful about his lyrics, thought he was God’s bloody gift to music where they (and everything else) were concerned. But there he was, shouting in John’s face about the sanctity of his personal stuff and not seeing works of art before they were finished and the like. 

 

“Come off it, it’s just a stupid fucking song,” John had reminded him, and for some mad reason that had merely served to make Paul angrier. And it  _was_ a stupid fucking song.  

 

She loves you, he loves you, she wants you back, I want you back, don’t leave me girl, girls and boys, load of bollocks yeah yeah yeah. Could be the words on a bloody cornflake box tossed in there, as long as it made ‘em scream. Lyrics had, until recently, always been secondary to their music. This one wasn’t any different. Just as tepid, more boring. The only thing he could reckon was that Paul had written the thing as an apology after rowing with Jane and felt touchy about having gotten so personal. _At times things are so fine and at times they’re not_ , and all that. He wondered how he might have taken it if Paul knew or guessed how personal “Help!” was. He wouldn’t have liked it, to be sure. But he wouldn’t have been a fucking nancy-boy about it. 

 

Now Paul stood up, laying his guitar into a nearby stand. John watched as he grabbed his coat, unruffled, and took his time buttoning himself into it. 

 

“Cheers,” he said to Ringo and George, and nodded at the control room. His eyes were anywhere but on John as he strolled out of the studio. 

 

“Bloody thick fucking arsehole,” John said, knowing that was the end of the session, but of course Paul was already gone.

 

 

**September 1964**

 

Ringo’d had it figured out for some time, how Paul felt about John. He’d watched it first take shape sometime between late ‘61 and early ‘62. Back then, Paul’s feelings had flittered across his face only during rare moments, disappearing before anyone else could see them like sentences hastily erased. Ringo didn’t think Paul himself had been aware of them. After some months, though, those sentences had grown into a novel, writ plain across Paul’s face for anyone to read. Yet no one but Ringo seemed to know the language. He couldn’t believe John and George hadn’t translated it, couldn’t believe that Brian hadn’t either, but then Brian knew what it meant to be in love with John and keep quiet about it, poor chap. Maybe he’d buttoned his lips out of pity for Paul. 

 

In the beginning Ringo had been convinced that it was the two of them. It was hard to ignore, the way they behaved on stage when Ringo sometimes sat in for Pete. John would fuss with Paul’s hair making sure it looked just-so for the birds, Paul would lean all over John riffling through the pockets of his leather jacket for ciggies and John would let him. Once, Ringo had even seen John, half-drunk, slip his hand into Paul’s back pocket, looking for all the world like he was having a feel of his friend’s arse. Ringo, who hadn’t met very many queers at that juncture, felt hot and alarmed at the sight, looking away before he could confirm what John was really up to. 

 

The more he kept their company, though, the more time he had to read John the way he’d learned to read people as a child, perpetually forced into adult company because his mum never gave him any brothers or sisters to play with, because he had to sit in a booth at the pub long nights waiting for her shift to be over when his gran couldn’t look after him. For as long as he could remember he’d been trying to figure them out, grown-ups handing him peanuts from the bowls on the bartop and letting him sip from their pints for a laugh, grown-ups clucking over him in hospital and fetching him books, grown-ups calling on his mum for afternoon tea and talking about Ritchie’s growth and progress as if he weren’t there at all. All the while, he’d been committing their various tics and mannerisms and feelings to memory.

 

‘Course he hadn’t done it in a conscious way. It was just a knack, a weird gift he had, to know what people were thinking and feeling. 

 

John, any road, did not return Paul’s feelings. He was often tenderer with Paul than he was with others, but something told Ringo that John didn’t regard Paul the same way he did Girls. John had a boundless enthusiasm for Girls, never tired of asking them cheeky questions and making them laugh or gasp, then taking them to bed once he’d softened them up. He needn’t have bothered with the charm, had tens of thousands of birds at his beck and call now, but it was evident that he loved to know that he appealed to women. It didn’t take long for Ringo to notice that Paul was in competition with John. John had a bird, so Paul had two. Whether he genuinely enjoyed these women, copping a feel in front of the others, having their tongues in his mouth, Ringo didn’t know. But anytime he saw Paul getting up to it, he couldn’t stop the thought, “The lady doth protest too much.”

 

So when Paul approached him where he was sitting at the back of the plane having a quiet read while the others were asleep, Ringo knew what was coming.

 

“Alright?” said Paul, taking the aisle seat opposite him. He poked the light above him so it turned on. Apart from it and Ringo’s light, the rest of the plane was dark. 

 

“Thought you was asleep,” said Ringo. He closed the book around his left hand and tried not to be too obvious as he angled his arm and attempted to read his wristwatch. Midnight, nearly. He found he couldn’t remember where they were flying from or flying to.

 

“Whatcha reading?” Paul said, sidestepping the question.

 

Ringo held the book up so that Paul had a better view of the jacket.

 

“What’s a hobbit?” said Paul.

 

“I dunno, it’s a bit hard to explain. He’s a little man and—” He stopped. “C’mon, let’s have it. What’s on your mind?”

 

Paul rubbed the side of his nose with a finger, as he always did whenever he was nervous. “Uh sure, well …” He appeared to be thinking. “I just wondered, have you noticed anything about John?”

 

No I haven’t, was what Ringo wanted to reply, don’t drag me into this. But he played along because that was his job. “Not really, why?” Ringo knew what Paul wanted to be given, a sign that someone else had seen it, that it wasn’t in his head.

 

“I just think he’s been funny and that lately,” he said, biting his lower lip. “We um, we stayed up late last night. Four or five, I think it was.”

 

Ah, yes. They’d all been in Paul’s and John’s suite having a laugh and a drink. Ringo departed for bed at midnight after his fourth rum and Coke and he’d heard George let himself into the room as he was drifting off. It hadn’t occurred to him that Paul and John had kept the party going, though that would explain the snores Ringo had been hearing from John’s seat at the front of the plane almost as soon as they’d boarded.

 

The dread of what Paul was going to tell him next was outweighed by politeness, however, and he settled on the neutral, “Rather late.”

 

“Christ, tell me about it. It still feels like I’ve got someone drilling into my head,” said Paul, cracking a half-smile. He cleared his throat. “I’m still not sure what happened. We were just talking, talking, talking, you know, and the next thing I remember we’re both in tears, lying there hugging and carrying on.”

 

Ringo’s insides felt icy cold. Don’t, he wanted to say. Don’t ruin this for me and George.

 

Paul furrowed his brow. “Can’t remember what set us off. Must’ve been our mums. Yeah, I think that was it … It felt like we cried for hours. We just—said a lot of things, you know?”

 

“Sounds serious,” Ringo managed.

 

“Seems a bit silly when I think about it now,” Paul said. “You know, patting each other on the back and telling each other how wonderful we both are. He said that he loved me, I said I loved him. ‘I love you, man. I love you too, man.’ We were lying there on the floor of the loo just pissed out of our minds.”  
  
“Doesn’t sound unusual to me,” said Ringo, struggling to keep his voice light. “I mean, no secrets there, right? We’re a pretty close bunch.”

 

“No, it wasn’t like that. It was . . . I can’t describe it.”

 

Paul fell silent and, not knowing how to delicately free them both from the situation, Ringo did as well. He tried not to let his mind skip ahead to what would happen if John and Paul both declared themselves cut of the same cloth as Brian. You could always depend on Paul to be the soul of discreetness, but John was a live wire. There was no telling what John might say or do, simply to be provocative. It would be a fucking nightmare. The end of all of them.

 

“It’s hard to remember properly now,” said Paul, breaking the silence, “but I think he may have kissed me.”  
  
“You think he kissed you? Well, either he did or he didn’t, which one is it?”

 

“I suppose he kissed me, then.”

 

“You think that’s it?” said Ringo, surprised that his voice sounded a little unkind. “You think our Johnny boy’s a poofter?”

 

Paul sounded affronted. “No, I’m not suggesting _that_.” Though of course that had been exactly what he was suggesting and what he, Ringo suspected, had hoped Ringo would confirm from the moment he sat down.

 

“What are you saying?” For the first time, Ringo looked Paul right in the eyes. He wanted Paul to understand that he couldn’t have this. He could travel with nine hundred singing and dancing whores if it made him happy, but he couldn’t have this. Not if the band meant anything to him. And not if his friends meant anything to him.

  
Paul looked back at him. Ringo didn’t often feel older than Paul, but this time every month of the two years that separated them was palpable. Let this go, Paul, he tried to make his eyes say. It’s not doing you any favours. You’ve seen firsthand what this does to people, you know how unhappy Brian is. This can’t go anywhere. Just forget about it.

 

“Look, Paul. I’m going to say this one time and then we’re going to forget I ever said it,” said Ringo. “John loves you, I can see that. And maybe he’s starting to think he can love you the way that you love him, I don’t know. But this will never work out, mate, never mind that it’s against the bloody law! It’ll break up the band. And you know how John is. He’ll get tired after awhile. You’ve seen how he is with girls, he never sticks to one very long. I think you’re better off forgetting the whole thing.” He didn’t plan to, but he reached across the aisle and patted Paul’s knee.  
  
Paul remained quiet, but there was a look like broken glass in his eyes. He cleared his throat again. “You’re right. I’m not sure what I was thinking.” He stood up and cleared his throat a third time. “Thanks for talking me through it, any road.”  
  
“Any time, mate,” said Ringo, bending his mouth into possibly the falsest smile he’d ever mustered in living memory.  
  
They must have raised their voices without realising it because as Paul stooped to switch off the overhead light, from the front of the plane John yelled, “Shaddup, I’m trying to sleep!”

 

 

**October 1964**

 

He loved them, but they irritated the living piss out of him sometimes. Grass had been a communal affair since Dylan had introduced it to them, but lately John and Paul had taken to smoking it together, just the two of them passing a joint back and forth. Afterwards they’d retire to one of the hotel sofas or some chairs in the corner of the room for their own little chin wag when all George wanted was for them to pay attention when he said, “Listen here to what I’ve written.” He knew he was good, he knew he could write like them if given the chance, he simply needed input once and awhile, but it was impossible to talk to them when they got like that, poking at each other and collapsing into laughter over jokes that no one else could make sense of. It made him feel uncomfortably like a kid again, left out of Harry’s and Peter’s mutual schemes, too young to understand the world like his big brothers did.

 

He played an A, a D, an A, a suspended fourth, trying to block them out. It was sick the way they carried on, snorting and giggling and saying stuff in undertones, just loud enough to distract him. He had a feeling they were doing it deliberately and sure enough, next thing he knew, he was closing his eyes reflexively as something sailed through the air and whacked him on the left cheekbone, bouncing to the floor.  

 

He looked up at John and Paul, then down at the floor at someone’s balled-up sock. John cackled, stretching out a naked foot in a ballet dancer’s pointe.

 

“Very mature,” George said drily, strumming another A. He almost had this.

 

John pounced on Paul, pressing one hand down on his stomach to hold him in place and wrestling off one of Paul’s socks with the other as Paul laughed and writhed and tried to push him away. George was not surprised when a second sock hit him across the head a second later. Howls of laughter came from the couch. They’d really overdone it with the grass.

 

“Right,” he said, trying not to betray his annoyance. “See you lot later.” Ringo had laid down for a kip in the other room, but he was just going to have to put up with George; he’d almost gotten the hang of this one and he wasn’t about to let Paul and John spoil it.

 

Their laughter followed him to the door. Before he opened it he gave one last glance at them. John had collapsed onto his back with his head across Paul’s lap, eyes squeezed shut with tears leaking from them. Christ, they were bloody childish sometimes. As George was beginning to turn away, Paul laid his hand on John’s forehead and smoothed his hair back. And while neither John nor Paul responded in any particular way to this intimate gesture, the hair on the back of George’s neck prickled and for one moment a horrifying thought occurred to him. Then, as swiftly as it had come, it was gone and they were just his mates again, annoying the piss out of him.

 

 

**December 1964**

 

A friend says that your love won’t mean a lot

But you know that your love is all you’ve got

At times things are so fine and at times they’re not

But when he says he loves you that means a lot

 

A friend says that a love is never true

But you know that this can't apply to you

A touch can mean so much when it’s all you’ve got

And when he says he loves you that means a lot

 

Love can be deep inside

Love can be suicide

Can’t you see you can’t hide

What you feel when it’s real

 

A friend says that your love won’t mean a lot

But you know that your love is all you’ve got

A touch can mean so much when it’s all you’ve got

But when he says he loves you that means a lot

 

 **Author's note** : Listen to "[That Means A Lot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8HjTNNLIk8)."

**Author's Note:**

> More about "That Means A Lot" at The Beatles Bible here: http://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/that-means-a-lot/
> 
> I had the idea for the story while listening to the Anthology 2 (on which this song appears) during my commute. Paul McCartney is known for his obtuse lyrics--what if this one was encoded with a hidden meaning? 
> 
> The drunken night between Paul and John actually happened around 10 September, 1964 while the band was diverted in Key West, Florida. Paul references it in his song "Here Today." More here: http://www.beatlesbible.com/1964/09/10/day-off-key-west-florida/
> 
> The song George is working on is "I Need You."


End file.
